I'm a reader, and lately I've had to turn to my books, as my computer at home is showing signs of ill-health or old age and generally is not working right. So my on-line reading is pretty much on hold.

But most of my books are in boxes, awaiting the long-delayed arrival of some book cases some friends say they have put together for me. The book cases are a hundred odd miles away and it seems to be an insuperable distance.

So I picked the low hanging fruit - a box on the floor with a couple of volumes in it that I have been putting off reading for decades. One of them is "Khrushchev Remembers," the memoirs of the Soviet dictator who is maybe the first international figure I was really aware of in my early years.

The book was published in 1970. I found my copy second-hand somewhere along the line; I've had the book so long I no longer remember, unlike Khrushchev, where I even got it. I suspect a Friends of the Library sale somewhere. It's the kind of book to end up in that kind of sale.

I hadn't read it because I couldn't get past the somewhat turgid introduction, by a British journalist who spent years in Moscow covering the Stalin-era Soviet government and who personally knew all the characters Khrushchev talks about. He provides very valuable comments and footnotes throughout the book, but his introduction is not compelling. This time I just skipped it.

Khrushchev interests me because he was the Soviet strongman when I was growing up. Outside of an "I Like Ike" button floating around the house in 1956, I first became aware of the great big world out there around 1960. There was the Kennedy-Nixon debate (we were a Nixon household because Kennedy was Catholic and we were Baptists), but before that was a big dust-up over a scheduled summit meeting between Ike and Khrushchev that got canceled after a U.S. spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory a short time before the summit was to take place.

What got my 8-year-old attention back then was that the U.S. government at first denied the incident, then when the Soviets produced the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, alive and pretty much well, had to admit that it had happened after all. (Our side had bet that Powers was dead.) This was my first exposure to the U.S. government getting caught in a lie. Up until then, I believed as I was taught: Our side was perfect; the Soviets were evil and always wrong. It was a shock to my young system.

Khrushchev recounts with some glee the propaganda coup brought about by the U2 incident. What Americans at the time did not appreciate - not even our own government - was how great an inferiority complex the Soviets had regarding the West and especially the United States.

In 1960, the USSR was far, far behind the United States in every military match-up except for the number of men in its army. Khrushchev ordered an all-out build-up of Soviet missile strength as the only way to achieve some sort of parity with the United States. In PR terms, it worked. One of the big issues in the 1960 U.S. presidential election was John Kennedy's charge that a "missile gap" existed between the United States and the USSR - in their favor. It wasn't true, Kennedy probably knew it, but he beat the issue like drum anyway.

Beyond that, one revelation in Khrushchev's memoir took me quite by surprise. Before World War II, the Soviet Union supplied arms and supplies to Chiang Kai-shek in his civil war against Mao Tse Tung. I'ev never come across that before. During and after the war, Chiang was our guy who stuck to the United States like glue, while Mao was a dirty Commie, indistinguishable from the devils in Moscow.

According to the notes of the book, "Mao never forgot" the early Soviet support for Chiang, which might well account for the tension and hostility that always existed between the USSR and Red China. Americans, I think, never really appreciated the depth of the hostility between the two countries. During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese continually played one off against the other to get the best deal on arms and food aid. In 1969, long after Khrushchev left the scene, China and the USSR actually engaged in a brief shooting war over some disputed territory. It didn't get a lot of attention at the time because when two totalitarian governments control all the news, not a lot leaks out. Neither side won the war, by the way. Both governments realized it was pretty foolish and agreed to a cease-fire.

Also worth noting is Khrushchev's version of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had 10-year-olds in schoolyards across the nation looking up at every plane passing overhead, wondering if that was the one that was going to drop the Bomb. It was a tense time.

Khrushchev's account is that by 1962, his government realized Cuba was a valued ally, and the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, even though it was a disaster, was a sign that the United States would keep trying to overthrow Fidel Castro until it got it right. He decided to move ICBMs into Cuba as a warning to the United States that the U.S. mainland would be at risk if we invaded again.

In Khrushchev's eyes, the crisis played out as a Soviet victory because President Kennedy pledged (secretly) never to invade Cuba, and that was what Khrushchev wanted. Our side had better PR, however, and the world generally saw the crisis as the United States having forced the Soviets to back down. What Khrushchev saw as a victory actually was the trigger that began two years of plotting within the Kremlin. He was deposed in August 1964, a fact that goes totally unmentioned in the book.

The world has done pretty much a 180 since his day, and Khrushchev is not much remembered today. But he did live a heck of a life.